Spotlight

Little Miss Miracle

Stellar young actresses Abigail Breslin and Alison Pill were photographed in New York City. Photograph by Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton.

After a 49-year absence, William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker, about the afflicted young Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan, is returning to the Great White Way. The revival, directed by Kate Whoriskey, who last year directed the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ruined, by Lynn Nottage, stars Abigail Breslin, the 13-year-old Academy Award nominee from Little Miss Sunshine (2006), and Alison Pill, a ripe 24, who received a Tony nomination for her work in The Lieutenant of Inishmore in 2006 and is best known in film for her performance as the young activist Anne Kronenberg in Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008). They’re stepping into big shoes. The play, which opened in 1959 and ran for 719 performances, was directed by Arthur Penn and starred Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Bancroft, Penn, and the play won Tonys, and Duke won a Theatre World Award. Three years later, both actresses won Oscars for the film version. Breslin is ready for it: “I’ve always loved Helen Keller. When I was about seven or eight, I got this book—a kids’ biography of her—and I read it about 20 times in the period of, like, a week, because I loved it so much and I loved her story. Ever since then I’ve always wanted to play her.” Pill, who, like Breslin, was a teenage star, senses how high the stakes are: “Suddenly the pressure is on, because I’m not playing the role of child actor, I’m playing the role that Anne Bancroft made famous. It’s a different thing. It’s only now that it’s kind of setting in that I’m absolutely terrified.”